I'm still here!!

Ooookay, so it's been a while since my last post. For this I apologize. Things have been busy, though not very interesting. I'll elaborate ...

I got home from break on Saturday. On Sunday, I did my usual grocery shopping. We're now splitting the budget between Sam's Club and a super Wal-Mart that we found. Things have been under budget for the last two weeks, so that's good.

Monday through Thursday of last week pretty much all we did was swamp, even on our day with Open Spaces. I dropped Tree #2 at some point (I forget which day). It was big, I didn't realize how large it was until it was down and we took a look at the stump. It wasn't huge, but it was a little more than a foot in diameter. On Friday, we actually got a change in our routine. Earth 4 went elsewhere, while Earth 5 ended up going to a prescribed burn to mop up. They had burned piles the day before and we were there to turn the ashes over and make sure everything was cold and out. It was different, thankfully. It was also a good experience, even though I'm sure we'll mop up so much that we'll get sick of it. We had an engine with us that had water, so that made things a bit easier. The last spot we mopped was big, with about five of us on it. While we were checking for hot spots, I found one next to a burned stump. I dug around it, got it a little wet, mixed it up and then felt around it again. I continued to do this and the spot continued to get bigger. I ended up pulling out about three or four big rocks buried in the ash. We dug until the spot essentially became a ditch and even then it still didn't seem to want to cool down. And the deeper I went, the hotter it felt. It was a bit baffling. We had to wrap up though, so we just left the ditch open to cool off on its own.

This past weekend was fun. We've been able to hang out with some of the Forest Service people a little. Friday night, we all hung out together down in Nederland. On Saturday, I took Nikki to Urgent Care in Boulder because she'd been coughing all week. About two hours later, we finally found out that she had bronchitis. She got a prescription and got some medicine for it. That night, a few of us went back down to Nederland. She deteriorated from there and spent most of Sunday in bed, the poor thing.

On Sunday, we were supposed to have an ISP scheduled for the whole day. We got down the mountain to the edge of Boulder when everyone got a cell signal back and we all got voicemails from Joanna, a girl on Earth 4. It turns out that the ISP was cancelled. So we turned around and went back up the mountain. I went for a run and then got the grocery shopping out of the way. When we got back, some of the Forest Service guys were trying to set up an Ultimate game. Everyone on my team who wanted to play ended up changing their minds, so that left only four of us. We decided to just throw the Frisbee around in the driveway instead. After that, we all hunkered down infront of the tv and watched Ax Men on the Discovery Channel. That was a lot of fun, just because we all have experience with chainsaws now. The comments from the Forest Service guys were particularly amusing because they've been doing it for so long.

Today was more of the same -- falling trees, limbing, bucking and swamping (but no chipping for once, yay!). I dropped trees #3 and #4 today, so I'm glad to have a little more experience under my belt. I hope to have more just because the more I have to do it, the more comfortable I'll feel.

Well, the library is closing in about fifteen minutes so I'd better go. I hope it won't be quite so long before my next post!